Most Innovative Release Since Launch of Pivotal Cloud Foundry

On December 5, 2017, Pivotal is announcing the next era of Pivotal Cloud Foundry® (PCF), one of the world’s most powerful cloud-native platforms, that will include: (1) a new serverless computing product called Pivotal Functions Service™ (PFS); (2) the initial availability of our VMware, in collaboration with Google Cloud, Pivotal Container Service™ (PKS); and (3) our expanded Pivotal Services Marketplace, a PCF marketplace featuring add-on services from GitHub, Splunk, New Relic, Apigee, IBM, and many more.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry: A Unified Platform to Run Your Business

Pivotal Cloud Foundry is engineered to deliver a single software platform capable of scaling to support thousands of IT teams and thousands of applications. Most importantly, enterprise customers will realize benefits such as:

Developer productivity. Software developers can focus on accelerating feature delivery instead of operations tasks. With the portfolio of modern runtimes in PCF, engineers can use the right tools for that job—e.g., push code, manage containers, and run functions in similar ways.

Operational efficiency. PCF adopters running at scale may enjoy a 500:1 developer to operator ratio. Ops teams can perform system updates with minimal downtime. And PCF runs the same way in the public cloud or in an enterprise data center, so it’s easier to manage.

High availability. Ops teams can use PCF’s automation to keep applications online, under even the most challenging circumstances.

At SpringOne Platform, Pivotal’s annual developer conference, we announced several new major innovations such as:

PCF: Serverless

Pivotal’s new serverless computing product, Pivotal Function Service, is expected to become available in 2018. Developers can use PFS to trigger activity based on data sent by users or messaging systems like RabbitMQ® or Apache Kafka® .

Engineers will build functions—small snippets of code.

These functions are then executed in PCF in response to events occurring.

Software can react more intelligently to user requests and business data.

An extensive preview of PFS will be shown on stage at SpringOne Platform on Wednesday, December 6, 2017.

PCF: Containers

Pivotal’s new container service, jointly developed by Pivotal and VMware, in colloboration with Google Cloud, is initially available. The offering, called Pivotal Container Service, helps companies run the popular Kubernetes® container orchestration tool in their data center and the public cloud. It is one of the only products with constant compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE).

Additional capabilities include:

Support for open-source Kubernetes. The service runs the current stable release of Kubernetes. Developers have full access to the Kubernetes API, with no proprietary extensions.

PCF: Applications

Pivotal’s new application runtime, Pivotal Application Service, is upgraded as part of the expansion of PCF. Some of the world’s largest brands deploy and run their most important workloads on this cloud-native platform. Highlights of the new release will include:

First-class support for Windows Server 2016 containers. Customers running applications built with Microsoft’s .NET Framework gain access to container features similar to those used in Linux systems. Many PCF features (e.g., CPU autoscaling) now “just work” for .NET applications on Windows.

Healthwatch. Healthwatch is an operational dashboard for PCF. The product monitors and displays important data about the platform’s performance. Technical details are rendered in visual dashboards to help IT staff keep systems running smoothly.

NSX-T integration. IT teams will be able to use PCF and NSX-T from VMware to create a common operational model for cloud-native and traditional apps. This helps enterprises create and enforce networking and security policies across their entire organization.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry: How Far We’ve Come

When Pivotal was founded in 2013, we focused on building a next-generation cloud platform capable of helping Fortune 500 companies build and run their “big bet” applications in areas such as the internet of things (IoT), connected cars and homes, and artificial intelligence and advanced analytics. Moreover, these sophisticated cloud-native applications needed to run on any public or private cloud infrastructure—across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, VMware vSphere, Openstack, etc.

In 2015, due to demand from the world’s largest enterprises, we added support for legacy applications. Developers and operators from Fortune 100 companies formed smaller, agile, high performance IT teams and migrated thousands of legacy applications onto PCF—allowing them to aspire to achieve extraordinary business outcomes on their digital transformation journey, such as:

In mid-2017, in order to help Fortune 500 companies unlock even greater speeds, Pivotal launched Pivotal Container Service at VMworld 2017, alongside Google Cloud and VMware. PKS, a component within PCF, is engineered to run additional legacy applications, off-the-shelf software, and software with complex networking requirements better suited for containers.

In late-2017, we continue to expand PCF, and announced its newest component—a serverless computing product, Pivotal Functions Service. This serverless offering is engineered to run new kinds of event-driven applications. For example, a large bank can send a notification to a customer whose mobile banking app is detected in another country, asking whether they want to activate the use of their credit card in that location.

Today, the expansion of PCF allows the world’s largest companies to run their businesses on one of the most powerful cloud-native platforms, and to achieve the agility commonly associated with startups and Internet giants.

Pivotal Cloud Foundry: Ecosystem Adoption

In order for Fortune 500 companies to operate at startup speeds, they need to migrate the thousands of applications that run their existing businesses onto PCF—which requires cloud-native modernization know-how and easy access to complementary services. As a result, in addition to building a cloud-native platform designed to run an entire business, our customers have encouraged Pivotal to create a broad PCF ecosystem comprised of the “who’s who” of technology.

At SpringOne Platform, we also announced PCF ecosystem partner news such as:

GitHub

Pivotal and GitHub announced a strategic collaboration to deliver GitHub Enterprise on PKS, expanding the portfolio of DevOps tools available to customers for cloud-native application development. GitHub Enterprise provides secure code repository management and this joint effort addresses the need for an integrated set of best-in-class tools on a resilient and scalable platform, across public and private clouds.

IBM

Pivotal and IBM announced a series of joint efforts related to modern enterprise Java development, microservices, and cloud-native design patterns. The two companies are collaborating on the following initiatives:

Adding Open Liberty as an embedded server option in Spring Boot

Commercial support for the IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty Buildpack in PCF

Docker images for IBM products that run on PKS a first wave of products including WebSphere Liberty, and MQ with many more to come in 1Q such as API Connect and IBM Integration Bus.

Microsoft

Pivotal and Microsoft announced beta support for Azure Stack in this latest Pivotal Cloud Foundry release. Customers can test PCF in this on-premises extension of Microsoft Azure. Operators can configure Azure Stack-specific settings (e.g., domain, authentication, endpoint prefix). All other elements of PCF setup and management will be identical to other infrastructure targets.

Virtustream

Pivotal and Virtustream announced the availability of Virtustream’s managed service based on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The offering includes the latest release of PCF running on Virtustream Enterprise Cloud. Daily management and maintenance of the platform and infrastructure is handled by Virtustream technical staff, reducing the operational burden for enterprises.